Electrical terminals are used in a wide variety of applications for terminating electrical conductors so that the conductors can be connected to other electrical devices. The terminals often have contact portions whereby the terminated conductors are connected to the other electrical devices through interengagement of the contact portions of mating terminals.
With the ever-increasing miniaturization of contemporary electronics and electrical devices, it continuously becomes increasingly difficult to design electrical terminals which meet the dimensional parameters or size restrictions required in many applications. In other words, the electrical terminals have become smaller and smaller, resulting in many design difficulties.
For example, cellular or mobile telephones have become increasingly smaller in size or overall dimensions. Correspondingly, the battery packs for such telephones are a fraction of the size of battery packs only a few years ago. These battery packs require electrical terminals which, in turn, also must be considerably miniaturized. Such miniaturization creates all kinds of problems in terminal configuration and design. For instance, heretofore, the terminals in a battery pack for a cellular or mobile telephone most often were soldered to the conductors of flat flexible cables within the pack. Because of the miniaturization, such soldering techniques have become increasingly difficult, if at all possible since the high temperature for soldering could destroy the conductor on the flat flexible circuitry. Consequently, crimp terminals have been considered for such uses.
Heretofore, crimp terminals most often have included a channel-shaped terminating portion for receiving the electrical conductor to be terminated. The channel-shaped terminating portion includes a base or web, with a pair of sidewalls extending from the two opposite longitudinal edges of the web. The sidewalls are crimped inwardly toward each other for terminating the electrical conductor. If the sidewalls are disposed diametrically opposite each other, i.e. transversely across the web, obviously the web and, in turn, the terminating portion of the terminal must be sufficiently wide to allow the sidewalls to be fully bent inwardly toward the opposite sidewalls. In order to reduce the width of the terminating crimp portion of the terminal, the crimpable sidewalls have been staggered lengthwise of the terminal so that the sidewalls can be crimped in a fashion to bypass each other when crimped generally toward each other. However, when the sidewalls are staggered to reduce the width of the terminal, the length of the terminal then is made longer than if the sidewalls were diametrically opposite each other. This dilemma has caused considerable comprises in reducing the overall dimensions of such crimpable terminals.
The present invention is directed to solving the above problems in a crimpable electrical terminal which has reduced dimensional parameters than heretofore has been available in the prior art.